Wearing bright red trajes with white embroidery and the traditional Mexican sombrero, the Mariachi De Los Texas Rangers fills the air at Globe Life Field with warm guitar strumming. Except the group isn’t playing traditional classics like “Cielito Lindo”; it’s treating fans to its own riff on Creed’s “Higher.”
The video caught fire online during a game against the New York Mets on June 17, when a Mets fan account shared a thirty-second clip of the Creed cover on social media. Last season, Rangers players shared that they played Creed before each game. During the team’s 2023 playoff run, which culminated in the franchise’s first World Series championship, “Higher” became a lucky charm for the fan base.
“We didn’t expect it at all,” says Cindy Cabrera, an Arlington native and the mariachi group’s lead violinist and vocalist, about the band’s viral moment. “We are really happy that the talent of everybody in the group has shown.”
The Texas Rangers are the first and only Major League Baseball team with an official mariachi ensemble. The group was formed in 2022 and consists of eight musicians from the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. It performs at the ballpark for every Monday home game throughout the season, in line with a promotion called Mariachi Mondays.
“To be the first mariachi group for such a big league like this is massive,” says fellow lead and guitarrón, or bass, player Michael Gonzalez. “We are able to show off our music and that we not only play Spanish music, but we can also play the stuff that people here want to hear.”
Each with more than a decade’s worth of mariachi experience, Gonzalez and Cabrera had already played mariachi gigs at the Rangers’ former stadium, Globe Life Park, before the group officially formed. After the team moved into its new digs, in 2020, representatives of the franchise approached Gonzalez and Cabrera in 2022 with the idea of forming an official mariachi group. The two wound up hand-picking the rest of the ensemble.
They tried to find fellow musicians who were also Rangers fans. Both Gonzalez and Cabrera come from passionate baseball families. Gonzalez grew up loving the Rangers with his dad, and when Cabrera isn’t performing, she works as a retail manager at Globe Life Field. “We not only get to play music for a baseball team,” Gonzalez says. “It’s our baseball team.”
Before 2022, the Rangers would invite different mariachi groups to perform on special occasions, but Cabrera says the existence of an official group with a regular performance schedule allows the band to read the crowd and play songs that capture the collective mood throughout a game. Plus, fans get to familiarize themselves with the mariachis. “Whenever we are out of the suits, we are regular people,” Gonzalez says, “but when we have them on, people are so quick to say that we are awesome. [It’s] really cool to have people coming up to us to take pictures.”
The ensemble works closely with the stadium’s musical direction to include at least one English song per game. In the past, the group covered “We Are the Champions” in a game against the Astros. Each week before a performance, the musicians rehearse for three to five hours to play a five-minute set before the first pitch and a ninety-second set at the bottom of the first or third inning. “We don’t want the whole one minute to be one song and for it to be boring and people to lose interest,” Cabrera says. “So, we try to do a mixture of songs.”
Still, Cabrera says they were surprised by fans’ reception of the Creed cover, especially since the group tends to spend less time practicing covers and more time perfecting its transitions and signature sones, lively and danceable styles of mariachi music. “Even ‘Higher’—” she says, “we started with ‘Cielito Lindo,’ but nobody noticed that part.”
As for Creed, the mariachis say they’re planning more covers of the group’s rock anthems, along with other mariachi renditions of fan-favorite pop songs.
The Mariachi De Los Texas Rangers is already booked to perform at this year’s MLB All-Star Game, which the team will be hosting at Globe Life Field on July 16. But the group’s bread and butter remains performing for the hometown fans. “There really is nothing like playing for your favorite team,” Gonzalez says.
Apart from their game-day performances, the mariachis appear at Rangers cultural events like last month’s Mexican Heritage Day. “It’s heartwarming to see other Hispanics or older Hispanics and see that they are proud and love to see themselves represented in the ballpark where they don’t expect it,” Cabrera says. “Or people from other cultures who are not Hispanic who do a grito every time they see us.”
